Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Gabriel García Márquez Read Free Book Online Page A

used to go every summer. What happened?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : We were staying in a hotel when that north wind which really sets your nerves on edge started blowing. Mercedes and I spent three days in our room unable togo out. I had the sudden feeling, with absolute certainty, that I was in mortal danger. I knew that if I got out of Cadaqués alive I could never go back. When the wind stopped, we left immediately by that narrow, winding road. You known the one. I only breathed normally again when I got to Gerona. I’d had a miraculous escape, but I knew that if I went back I wouldn’t be so lucky next time.
    MENDOZA : How do you explain your famous premonitions?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : I think they respond to bits of information or clues I pick up in my subconscious.
    MENDOZA : I remember that first of January 1958, in Caracas, when you instinctively felt something serious was about to happen any second and, in fact, it did. There was a totally unexpected air raid on the Presidential Palace right in front of our noses. To this day I ask myself how or why you had that premonition.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : It was almost certainly because when I woke up that morning in the hostel where I was living I heard the engine of a fighter plane. It must have stuck in my subconscious that something unusual was happening because I’d just arrived from Europe, where fighter planes only fly over cities in wartime.
    MENDOZA : Are your premonitions very clear-cut?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : No, they are very vague, like a kind of misgiving, but they are always related to something definite. Look, the other day in Barcelona, while I was tying my shoelace, I had this hunch that something had just happened at home in Mexico. Not necessarily anything bad. Just something. I was worried all the same because my son Rodrigo was leaving by car for Acapulco that day. I asked Mercedes to phone home. In fact something had happened at the very moment I was tying my shoelace. Our maid had just had a baby. A boy. I breathed a sigh of relief that the premonition had nothing to do with Rodrigo at all.
    MENDOZA : Your premonitions and intuition have helped you a lot. You have based many important decisions in your life on them.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : Not only the most important. All of them.
    MENDOZA : All of them. Is that true?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : All of them. Every day. Every time I decide something I do it intuitively.
    MENDOZA : Let’s talk about your manias. Which is your biggest mania?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : My oldest and most constant mania is punctuality. I was punctual even as a child.
    MENDOZA : You were saying that when you make a typing error you start the page again. Is that mania or superstition?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : That’s sheet mania. To me a typing error or a crossing out is an error of style. (It can also be simply fear of writing.)
    MENDOZA : Do you have manias about clothes? I mean, do you have certain clothes which you don’t wear because they bring bad luck?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : Hardly ever. If it has
pava
I know before I buy it. Once, however, I stopped wearing a jacket because of Mercedes. She was coming back from school with the children and thought she saw me at one of the windows in the house with a checked jacket on. I was actually in another part of the house. When she told me this I never put that jacket on again. And I really like it, by the way.
    MENDOZA : Let’s talk about the things you like, as they do in women’s magazines. It’s amusing asking you the things we always ask beauty queens at home in Colombia. What is your favorite book?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ :
Oedipus Rex
.
    MENDOZA : Your favorite composer?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : Béla Bártok.
    MENDOZA : And painter?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : Goya.
    MENDOZA : The film director you most admire?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : Orson Welles, especially for
The Immortal Story
, and Kurosawa for
Red Beard
.
    MENDOZA : The film you most